INGLE: Christie banking on budget reform to regain mojo

Hit hard by scandal and falling poll numbers, Gov. Christie is going back to the future to regain his political mojo. His annual budget address announced a $34 billion spending program peppered with familiar themes from days gone by.

"If you want a better future tomorrow, we must prepare today," he said. "We must make good choices now, and we must make sacrifices."

Sacrifices have been requested before. His budget proposal is the largest in state history - but, he said, what the state can achieve is limited by obligations to public employee pension plans, health care benefits and debt obligations.

Sounding like he did as a candidate when he ran against Jon Corzine, and when he made reform proposals as governor, Christie warned, "Due to these exploding entitlement costs, we are failing our taxpayers when we refuse to honestly address these problems and try to fool them into believing that choices do not need to be made."

Talk about a looming financial disaster if corrective action isn't taken worked for Christie before and he's hoping it will connect now with an audience that will see him again as a populist hero standing up to a spend-and-tax-happy Legislature that walks over the little guy to kowtow to public employee unions and other special interests.

Missing from before were the brashness and bravado. He even quoted that champion of the kinder, gentler, non-violent set, Gandhi, calling him "a visionary. And while you don't think of him as a budget expert, he was right about this, too. If we want a better future tomorrow, we must prepare today."

After the budget speech, Christie hit the road to take his message directly to the people - first stop a town hall meeting in the friendly Republican environs of his home county, Morris.

There he told the receptive audience of about 500 that 94 percent of the increased spending - the total budget is up 4 percent - went to pensions, health benefits and debt obligations. Expect to hear about the Big Three a lot in the coming weeks and months.

"If we don't get this monkey off our backs of pensions, health benefits and debt services, we will never to be able to grow as a state. I'm calling this stuff out and we are going to try to fix it."

The budget proposal has a $2.25 billion pension payment, but even with the increasing pension payments over seven years required under law, the state worker retirement plan is $52 billion underfunded.

"Does anyone think we can have a $52 billion problem and do nothing? Not even (his friend, billionaire Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg could bail us out of this problem." He told the audience Detroit filed for bankruptcy over an $11 billion deficit - and $9.5 billion of that was owed to the pension system. "Detroit is giving us a preview of what could happen to us."

Towns can declare bankruptcy and it is becoming more common. There is nothing in the bankruptcy law about states but there is support in Congress for legislation that would allow it for them.

If that becomes law and New Jersey files for bankruptcy, public employees would get only a percentage of the retirement dollars they expected. It would be out of the hands of politicians, left to a bankruptcy judge who won't be swayed by political contributions or grandstanding bluster. There would be nowhere to run.

Democrats responded there wasn't that much of a problem and public employees had sacrificed enough, which plays right into Christie's hand, reinforcing the image he draws of failure to recognize a potential crisis for political convenience.

Given the choice of a four-day traffic jam at the George Washington Bridge in September and what is seen by many as the greed of public employee unions and corrupt politicians that cater to them, people in New Jersey and across the nation will think the latter is the bigger problem and Christie is the smart, straight-talking guy trying to save us.

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INGLE: Christie banking on budget reform to regain mojo

Hit hard by scandal and falling poll numbers, Gov. Christie is going back to the future to regain his political mojo. His annual budget address announced a $34 billion spending program peppered with

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